Abstract. Understanding adaptation to the local environment is a central tenet and a major focus of evolutionary biology. But this is only part of the adaptionist story. In addition to the external environment, one of the main drivers of genome composition is genetic background. In this perspective, I argue that there is a growing body of evidence that intra-genomic selective pressures play a significant part in the composition of prokaryotic genomes and play a significant role in the origin, maintenance and structuring of prokaryotic pangenomes.
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